Tag Archives: store analytics

My previous post covered the first half of my presentation on Machine Learning (ML) and store analytics at the Toronto Symposium. Here, I’m going to work through the case study on using ML to derive an optimal store path. For that analysis, we used our DM1 platform to source, clean, map and aggregate the data and then worked with a data science partner (DXi) on the actual analysis.

Why this problem?

Within DM1 we feel pretty good about the way we’ve built out visualizations of the store data that are easy to use and surprisingly powerful. The Full Path View, Funnel View and Store Layout View all provide really good ways to explore shopper path in the store.

But for an analyst, exploring data and figuring out a model are utterly different tasks. A typical store presents a nearly infinite number of possible paths – even when the paths are aggregated up to section level. So there’s no way to just explore the paths and find optimal ones.

Even at the most basic level of examining individual shopper paths, deciding what’s good and bad is really hard. Here’s two shopper paths in a store:

Which is better? Does either have issues? It’s pretty hard to know.

Why Machine Learning?

Optimal store pathing meets the basic requirements for using supervised ML – we have a lot of data and we have a success criteria (checkout). But ML isn’t worth deploying on every problem that has a lot of data and success criteria. I think about it this way – if I can get want I want by writing simple algorithmic code, then I don’t need ML. In other words, if I can write (for example) a sort and then some simple If-Then rules that will identify the best path or find problem path points, then that’s what we’ll do. If, for example, I just wanted to identify sections that didn’t convert well, it would be trivial to do that. I have a conversion efficiency metric, I sort by it (Ascending) and then I take the worst performers. Or maybe I have a conversion threshold and simply pick any Section that performs worse. Maybe I even calculate a standard deviation and select any section that is worse than 1 standard deviation below the average Section conversion efficiency. All easy.

But none of those things are really very useful when it comes to finding poor path performance in a robust fashion.

So we tried ML.

The Analysis Basics

The analysis was focused on a mid-sized apparel store with around 25 sections. We had more than 25,000 shopper visits. Which may not seem like very much if you’re used to digital analytics, but is a pretty good behavior base for a store. In addition to the basic shopper journey, we also had Associate interaction points (and time of interaction), and whether or not the shopper converted. The goal was to find potential store layout problems and understand which parts of the store drove to (or subtracted from) overall conversion efficiency.

Preparing the Data

The first step in any analysis (once you know what you want) is usually data preparation.

Our data starts off as a stream of location events. Those location events have an X,Y, Z coordinates that are offset from a zero point in the store. In the DM1 platform, we take that data and map it against a digital planogram capability that keeps a full, historical record of the store. That tells us what shoppers actually looked and where they spent time. This is the single most critical step in turning the raw data into something that’s analytically useful.

Since we also track Associates, we can track interaction points by overlaying the Associate data stream on top of the shopper stream. This isn’t perfect – it’s easy to miss short interactions or be confused by a crowded store – but particularly when it’s app to app tracking it works pretty well. Associate interaction points are hugely important in the store (as the subsequent analysis will prove).

Step 3 is knowing whether and when a shopper purchased. Most of the standard machine learning algorithms require having a way to determine if a behavior pattern was successful or not – that’s what they are optimizing too. We’re using purchase as our success metric.

The underlying event data gets aggregated into a single row per shopper visit. That row contains a visit identifier, a start and stop time, an interaction count, a first interaction time, a last interaction time, the first section visited, the time spent in each section and, of course, our success metric – a purchase flag.

That’s it.

The actual analytic heavy lifting was done by DXi on their machine learning platform. They use an ensemble approach – throwing the kitchen sink at the problem by using 25+ different algorithms to identify potential winners/losers (if you’d like more info or an introduction to them, drop me a line and I’ll connect you).

Findings

Here’s some of the interesting stuff that surfaced, plucked from the Case-Study I gave at the Symposium:

One of the poorest performing sections – unpicked by a single DXi ML algorithm as important – sits right smack dab in the middle of the store. That central position really surprised us. Yes, as you’ll see in a moment, the store has a successful right rail pattern – but this was a fairly trafficked spot with good sightlines and easy flow into high-value areas of the store.

Didn’t work well though. And that’s definitely worth thinking about from a store layout perspective.

One common browsing behavior for shoppers is a race-track pattern – navigating around the perimeter of the store. There’s a good example of that on the right-side image I showed earlier:

The main navigation path through the store is the red rectangle (red because this shopper spent considerable time there) – and you can see that while the shopper frequently deviated from that main path that their overall journey was a circuit around the store.

The ML algo’s don’t know anything about that – but they did pick out the relevant sections in the analyzed store along that starting path as really important for conversion.

We took that to mean that the store is working well for that race-track shopper type. An important learning.

For this particular store, casual shoes was picked as important by every ML algorithm – making it the most important section of the store. It also had the largest optimal time value – and clearly rewarded more time with higher conversion rates. Shoes, of course, is going to be this way. It’s not a grab and go item. So there’s an element of the obvious here – something you should expect when you unleash ML on a dataset (and hey – most analytics projects will, if they work at all, vacillate between the interesting and the obvious). But even compared to other types of shoe – this section performed better and rewarded more time spent – so there is an apples-to-apples part of this comparison as well.

The next finding was an interesting one and illustrates a bit of the balance you need to think about between the analyst and the algorithm. The display in question was located fairly close to cash-wrap on a common path to checkout. It didn’t perform horribly in the ML – some of the DXi algorithms did pick it as important for conversion. On the other hand, it was one of the few sections with a negative weighting to time spent – so more time spent means less likely conversion. We interpreted that combination as indicating that the section’s success was driven by geography not efficiency. It’s kind of like comparing Saudi Arabia vs. U.S. Shale drillers. Based purely on the numbers, Saudi Arabia looks super efficient and successful with the lowest cost per barrel of oil extracted in the world. But when you factor in the geographic challenges, the picture changes completely. SA has the easiest path to oil recovery in the world. Shale producers face huge and complex technical challenges and still manage to be price competitive. Geography matters and that’s just a core fact of in-store analytics.

Our take on the numbers when we sifted through the DXi findings was that this section was actually underperforming. It might take a real A/B test to prove that, but regardless I think it’s a good example of how an analyst has to do more than run an algorithm. It’s easy to fool even very sophisticated algorithms with strong correlations and so much of our post-analysis ANALYSIS was about understanding how the store geography and the algorithm results play together.

In addition to navigation findings like these, the analysis also included the impact of Associates on conversion. In general, the answer we got was the more interactions the merrier (at the cash register). Not every store may yield the same finding (and it’s also worth thinking about whether a single conversion optimization metric is appropriate here – in my Why Analytics Fails talk I argue for the value in picking potentially countervailing KPIs like conversion and shopper satisfaction as dual optimization points).

Even after multiple interactions, additional interactions had a positive impact on sales.

This should be obvious but I’ll hearken back to our early digital analytics days to make a point. We sometimes found that viewing more pages on a Website was a driver of conversion success. But that didn’t mean chopping pages in half (as one client did) so that that the user had to consume more pages to read the same content was a good strategy.

Just because multiple Associate interactions in a store with a normal interaction strategy created lift, it doesn’t mean that, for example, having your Associates tackle customers (INTERACTIOOOON!!!) as they navigate the floor will boost conversion.

But in this case, too much interaction was a legitimate concern. And the data indicates that – at least as measured by conversion rates – the concern did not manifest itself in shopper turn-off.

If you’re interested in getting the whole deck – just drop me a note. It’s a nice intro into the kind of shopper journey tracking you can do with our DM1 platform and some of the ways that machine learning can be used to drive better practice. And, as I mentioned, if you’d like to check out the DXi stuff – and it’s interesting from a pure digital perspective too – drop me a line and I’ll introduce you.

Take a minute (okay – a minute and a half) to check out this video overview of our DM1 store measurement platform. It’s the shortest and crispest introduction we’ve produced so far.

As more than one famous writer/philosopher has remarked, “If I had more time, it would have been shorter.” Brevity, like wit, takes work. And practice. We haven’t achieved wit, but we’re getting close to brevity:

I also really like the video’s flow. It starts with a very short intro into the basic concept of store measurement and then introduces the platform with the Digital Planogram tool – the Configurator. When you get right down to it, this capability is the single most important part of the platform. Digital representations of the store are critical to every report and analysis DM1 delivers. And the ability to rapidly create, adjust and maintain those digital maps is essential to making the tool work.

When we first released DM1 the configurator lagged behind some of the reporting tools – not very friendly and a little prone to bugginess. Its grown into quite a good tool – a pleasure to use and capable of handling even very complex store layouts pretty easily.

From the configurator, the video flows into the Layout tool – which just maps metrics right onto those digital planograms. Not only does this show how effortlessly you move from a map of the store to a metric, but I really like the way the video works through a small set of metrics to show how easy the visual interpretation is.

Once you’ve got a feel for basic metrics in the Store Layout, the next logical step is to tackle journey. And the next two sections highlight funnel and path analysis. Both of these tools help transition thinking from a static view of store performance to a focus on shopper journey. Funnels tell you how effective the store is in moving shoppers down an engagement path. Path helps you understand which in-store paths are popular and which drive conversion. After this, it’s a quick look at the data exploration capabilities of the platform – and the ability to build reports around whatever problem you choose to tackle. Finally, it wraps up with a sample of the dashboards.

Truth to tell, I’ve sometimes done this same presentation in almost the reverse order – starting with Dashboards and ending with configuration. It’s plausible that way too, but I think this works better for analysts. Because while dashboards are the first view for end-users of DM1, for analysts their task really starts with store mapping, proceeds through various levels of analysis, and ends with wrapping a nice, neat bow around the data for others. That’s that way this video proceeds and that makes the structure more compelling and natural if that’s the way you tend to think.

One of the most important questions in analytics today is the role for bespoke measurement and analytics versus BI and data visualization tools. Bespoke measurement tools provide end-to-end measurement and analytics around a particular type of problem. Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, our own DM1 platform are all examples of bespoke measurement solutions. Virtually every industry vertical has them. In health care, there are products like GSI Health and EQ Health that are focused on specific health-care problems. In hospitality, there are solutions like IDeaS and Kriya that focus on revenue management. At the same time, there are a range of powerful, general purpose tools like Tableau, Spotfire, Domo, and Qlik that can do a very broad range of dashboarding, reporting and analytic tasks (and do them very well indeed). It’s always fair game to ask when you’d use one or the other and whether or not a general purpose tool is all you need.

It’s a particularly important question when it comes to in-store location analytics. Digital analytics tools grew up in a market where data collection was largely closed and at a time when traditional BI and Data Viz tools had almost no ability to manage event-level data. So almost every enterprise adopted a digital analytics solution and then, as they found applications for more general-purpose tools, added them to the mix. With in-store tracking, many of the data collection platforms are open (thank god). So it’s possible to directly take data from them.

Particularly for sophisticated analytics teams that have been using tools like Tableau and Qlik for digital and consumer analytics, there is a sense that the combination of a general purpose data viz tool and a powerful statistical analysis tool like R is all they really need for almost any data set. And for the most part, the bespoke analytics solutions that have been available are shockingly limited – making the move to tools like Tableau an easy decision.

But our DM1 platform changes that equation. It doesn’t make it wrong. But I think it makes it only half-right. For any sophisticated analytics shop, using a general purpose data visualization tool and a powerful stats package is still de rigueur. For a variety of reasons, though, adding a bespoke analytics tool like DM1 also makes sense. Here’s why:

Why Users Level of Sophistication Matters

The main issue at stake is whether or not a problem set benefits from bespoke analytics (and, equally germane, whether bespoke tools actually deliver on that potential benefit). Most bespoke analytics tools deliver some combination of table reports and charting. In general, neither of these capabilities are delivered as well as general purpose tools do the job. Even very outstanding tools like Google Analytics don’t stack up to tools like Tableau when it comes to these basic data reporting and visualization tasks. On the other hand, bespoke tools sometimes make it easier to get that basic information – which is why they can be quite a bit better than general purpose tools for less sophisticated users. If you want simple reports that are pre-built and capture important business-specific metrics in ways that make sense right off the bat, then a bespoke tool will likely be better for you. For a reasonably sophisticated analytics team, though, that just doesn’t matter. They don’t need someone else to tell them what’s important. And they certainly don’t have a hard time building reports in tools like Tableau.

So if the only value-add from a bespoke tool is pre-built reports, it’s easy to make the decision. If you need that extra help figuring out what matters, go bespoke. If you don’t, go general purpose.

But that’s not always the only value in bespoke tools.

Why Some Problems Benefit from Bespoke

Every problem set has some unique aspects. But many, many data problems fit within a fairly straightforward set of techniques. Probably the most common are cube-based tabular reporting, time-trended data visualization, and geo-mapping. If your measurement problem is centered around either of the first two elements, then a general purpose tool is going to be hard to beat. They’ve optimized the heck out of this type of reporting and visualization. Geo-mapping is a little more complicated. General purpose tools do a very good job of basic and even moderately sophisticated geo-mapping problems. They are great for putting together basic geo-maps that show overlay data (things like displaying census or purchase data on top of DMAs or zip-codes). They can handle but work less well for tasks that involve more complicated geo-mapping functions like route or area-size optimization. For those kinds of tasks, you’d likely benefit from a dedicated geo-mapping solution.

When it comes to in-store tracking, there are 4 problems that I think derive considerable benefit from bespoke analytics. They are: data quality control, store layout visualization and associated digital planogram maintenance, path analysis, and funnel analysis. I’ll cover each to show what’s at stake and why a bespoke tool can add value.

Data Clean-up and Associate Identification

Raw data streams off store measurement feeds are messy! Well, that’s no surprise. Nearly all raw data feeds have significant clean-up challenges. I’m going to deal with electronic data here, but camera data has similar if slightly different challenges too. Data directly off an electronic feed typically has at least three significant challenges:

Bad Frame Data

Static Device Identification

Associate Device Identification

There are two types of bad frame data: cases where the location is flawed and cases where you get a single measurement. In the first case, you have to decide whether to fix the frame or throw it away. In the second, you have to decide whether a single frame measurement is correct or not. Neither decision is trivial.

Static device identification presents it’s own challenge. It seems like it ought to be trivial. If you get a bunch of pings from the same location you throw it away. Sadly, static devices are never quite static. Blockage and measurement tend to produce some movement in the specific X/Y coordinates reported – so a static device isn’t remotely still. This is a case where our grid system helps tremendously. And we’ve developed algorithms that help us pick out, label and discard static devices.

Associate identification is the most fraught problem. Even if you issue employee devices and provide a table to track them, you’ll almost certainly find that many Associates carry additional devices (yes, even if it’s against policy). If you don’t think that’s true, you’re just not paying attention to the data! You need algorithms to identify devices as Associates and tag that device signature appropriately.

Now all of these problems can be handled in traditional ETL tools. But they are a pain in the ass to get right. And they aren’t problems that you’ll want to try to solve in the data viz solution. So you’re looking at real IT jobs based around some fairly heavy duty ETL. It’s a lot of work. Work that you have to custom pay for. Work that can easily go wrong. Work that you have to stay on top of or risk having garbage data drive bad analysis. In short, it’s one of those problems it’s better to have a vendor tackle.

Store Layout Visualization

The underlying data stream when it comes to in-store tracking is very basic. Each data record contains a timestamp, a device id, and X,Y,Z coordinates. That’s about it. To make this data interesting, you need to map the X,Y,Z coordinates to the store. To do that involves creating (or using) a digital planogram. If you have that, it’s not terribly difficult to load that data into a data viz tool and use it as the basis for aggregation. But it’s not a very flexible or adaptable solution. If you want to break out data differently than in those digital planograms, you’ll have to edit the database by hand. You’ll have to create time-based queries that use the right digital layouts (this is no picnic and will kill the performance of most data viz tools), and you’ll have to build meta-data tables by hand. This is not the kind of stuff that data visualization tools are good at, and trying to use them this way is going to be much harder – especially for a team where a reasonable, shareable workflow is critical.

Contrast that to doing the same tasks in DM1.

DM1 provides a full digital store planogram builder. It allows you create (or modify) digital planograms with a point and click interface. It tracks planograms historically and automatically uses the right one for any given date. It maintains all the meta-data around a digital planogram letting you easily map to multiple hierarchies or across multiple physical dimensions. And it allows you to seamlessly share everything you build.

Once you’ve got those digital planograms, DM1’s reporting is tightly integrated. It’s just seamless to display metrics across every level of metadata right on the digital planogram. What’s more, our grid model makes the translation of individual measurement points into defined areas seamless and repeatable at even fine-grained levels of the store. If you’re relying on pre-built planograms, that’s just not available. And keep in mind that the underlying data is event-based. So if you want to know how many people spent more than a certain amount of time at a particular area of the store, you’ll have to pre-aggregate a bunch of data to use it effectively in a tool like Tableau. Not so in DM1 where every query runs against the event data and the mapping to the digital planogram and subsequent calculation of time spent is done on the fly, in-memory. It’s profoundly more flexible and much, much faster.

Path Analysis

Pathing is one of those tasks that’s very challenging for traditional BI tools. Digital analytics tools often distinguished themselves by their ability to do comprehensive pathing: both in terms of performance (you have to run a lot of detailed data) and visualization (it’s no picnic to visualize the myriad paths that represent real visitor behavior). Adobe Analytics, for example, sports a terrific pathing tool that makes it easy to visualize paths, filter and prune them, and even segment across them. Still, as nice as digital pathing is, a lot of advanced BI teams have found that it’s less useful than you might think. Websites tend to have very high cardinality (lots of pages). That makes for very complex pathing – with tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of slightly variant paths adding up to important behaviors. Based on that experience, when we first built DM1, we left pathing on the drawing board. But it turns out that pathing is more limited in a physical space and, because of that, actually more interesting. So our latest DM1 release includes a robust pathing tool based on the types of tools we were used to in digital.

With the path analysis, you start from any place in the store and you can see how people got there and where they went next. Even better, you can keep extending that view by drilling down into subsequent nodes. You can measure simple footpath, or you can look at paths in terms of engagement spots (DM1 has two different metrics that represent increasing levels of engagement) and you can path at any level of the store: section, department, display…whatever.

And, just like the digital analytics tools, you can segment the paths as well. We even show which paths had the highest conversion percentages.

Sure, you could work some SQL wizardry and get at something like this in a general purpose Viz tool. But A) it would be hard. B) it would slow. And C), it wouldn’t look as good or work nearly as well for data exploration.

Funnel Analysis

When I demo DM1, I always wrap-up by showing the funnel visualization. It shows off the platforms ability to do point to point to point analysis on a store and fill in key information along the way. Funnel analysis wraps up a bunch of stuff that’s hard in traditional BI. The visualization is non-standard. The metrics are challenging to calculate, the data is event-driven and can’t be aggregated into easy reporting structures, and effective usage requires the ability to map things like engagement time to any level of meta-data.

In the funnels here, you can see how we can effectively mix levels of engagement: how long people spent at a given meta-data defined area of the store, whether or not they had an interaction, whether they visited (for any amount of time) a totally different area of the store, and then what they purchased. The first funnel describes Section conversion efficiency. The second looks at the cross-over between Mens/Womens areas of the store.

And the third traces the path of shoppers who interacted with Digital Signage. No coding necessary and only minutes to setup.

That’s powerful!

As with path analysis, an analyst can replicate this kind of data with some very complicated SQL or programmatic logic. But it’s damn hard and likely non-performance. It’s also error-prone and difficult to replicate. And, of course, you lose the easy maintainability that DM1’s digital planograms and meta-data provide. What might take days working in low-level tools takes just a few minutes with the Funnel tool in DM1.

Finally, Don’t Forget to Consider the Basic Economics

It usually costs more to get more. But there are times and situations where that’s not necessarily the case. I know of large-scale retailers who purchase in-store tracking data feeds. And the data feed is all they care about since they’re focused on using BI and stats tools. Oddly, though, they often end up paying more than if they purchased DM1 and took our data feed. Odd, because it’s not unusual for that data feed to be sourced by the exact same collection technology but re-sold by a company that’s tacking on a huge markup for the privilege of giving you unprocessed raw data. So the data is identical. Except even that’s not quite right. Because we’ve done a lot of work to clean-up that same data source and when we process it and generate our data feed, the data is cleaner. We throw out bad data points, analyze static and associate devices and separate them, map associate interactions, and map the data to digital planograms. Essentially all for free. And because DM1 doesn’t charge extra for the feed, it’s often cheaper to get DM1 AND feed than just somebody else’s feed. I know. It makes no sense. But it’s true. So even if you bought DM1 and never opened the platform, you’d be saving money and have better data. It would be a shame not to use the software but…it’s really stupid to pay more for demonstrably less of the same thing.

Bottom Line

I have a huge amount of respect for the quality and power of today’s general purpose data visualization tools. You can do almost anything with those tools. And no good analytics team should live without them. But as I once observed to a friend of mine who used Excel for word processing, just because you can do anything in Excel doesn’t mean you should do everything in Excel! In store analytics, there are real reasons why a bespoke analytics package will add value to your analytics toolkit. Will any bespoke solution replace those data viz tools? Nope. Frankly, we don’t want to do that.

I know that DM1’s charting and tabular reporting are no match for what you can do easily in those tools. That’s why DM1 comes complete with a baked-in, no extra charge data feed of the cleaned event-level data and a corresponding visitor-level CRM feed. We want you to use those tools. But as deep analytics practitioners who are fairly expert in those tools, we know there’s some things they don’t make as easy as we’d like. That’s what DM1 is designed to do. It’s been built with a strong eye on what an enterprise analyst (and team) needs that wouldn’t be delivered by an off-the-shelf BI or data viz tool.

We think that’s the right approach for anyone designing a bespoke analytics or reporting package these days. Knowing that we don’t need to replace a tool like Tableau makes it easier for us to concentrate on delivering features and functionality that make a difference.

Over the last year, we’ve released a string of videos showing DM1 in action. These are marketing videos, meant to show off the capabilities of the platform and give people sense of how it can be used. Last week, though, we pushed a set of product How-To videos out to our YouTube channel. These videos are designed to walk new users through aspects of the product and are also designed to support users of our Sandbox. For quite awhile we’ve had a cloud-based Sandbox that partners can use to learn the product. In the next month or so, we’re going to take that Sandbox to the next level and make it available on the Google Cloud as part of a test drive. That means ANYONE will be able to roll their own DM1 instance for 24 hours – complete with store data from our test areas.

The videos are designed to help users go into the Sandbox and experiment with the product productively.

There are four videos in the initial set and here’s a quick look at each:

Dashboards: When I demo the product, I don’t actually spend much time showing the DM1 Dashboard. Sometimes I don’t show it at all since I tend to focus on the more interesting analytic stuff. But the Dashboard is the first thing you see when you open the product – and it’s also the (built-in) reporting view that most non-analysts are going to take advantage of. The Dashboard How-to walks through the (very simple) process of creating Panels (reports) and Alerts in the Dashboard and shows each type of viz and alert. Alerts, in particular, are interesting. Using Alerts, you can choose to always show a KPI, or have it pop only when a metric exceeds some change or threshold. From my marketing videos, you probably wouldn’t even realize DM1 has this capability, but it’s actually pretty cool.

Workbench: This is a quick tour of the entire Analytics Workbench. Most of this is stuff you do see in my other videos since this is where I tend to spend time. But the How-To video walks through the Left-Navigation options in the Workbench more carefully than I usually do in Marketing Videos and also shows Viz types like the DayMap that I often give short shrift.

Store Configuration: Digital Planograms are at the heart of DM1 and they underlie ALL the reporting in the Analytics Workbench (and are flat out the Viz in the Layout view). We’ve built a very robust point-and-click Configuration tool for building those Planograms. It’s a huge part of the product and a major differentiator. There’s nothing else like it out there. But because it’s more plumbing than countertop, I usually don’t show it at all in marketing videos. The How To vid shows how you can open, edit and save an existing digital planogram and how easy it is to create a new one.

Metadata: The store configurator maps the store and allows you to assign any part of the store to….well that’s where metadata comes in. DM1’s Admin interface includes a meta-data builder where you describe the Sections, Departments, Displays, Functions, Team Areas, etc. that matter to you. Meta-data is what makes basic locational data come alive. And DM1’s very robust capability let’s you define unlimited hierarchies, unlimited levels per hierarchy, and unlimited categories per level. What’s the word of the day around metadata? Unlimited. It’s pretty powerful but it’s really pretty easy to do as well and the How To vid gives you a nice little taste. And holy frig – I forgot to mention that not everyone on my team thought I should say “holy frig” in this video – but I left it in anyway.

It’s really capabilities like the Metadata builder and the Store Configurator that make DM1 true enterprise analytics. They provide the foundational elements that let you manage complex store setups and generate consistently interesting analytic reporting. Even if you’re not a user yet, check em out. If nothing else, you’ll be ready for a Test-Drive!

It’s been a little more than a year now for me in store analytics and with the time right after Christmas and the chance to see the industry’s latest at NRF 2018, it seems like a good time to reflect on what I’ve learned and where I think things are headed.

Let’s start with the big broad view…

The Current State of Stores

Given the retail apocalypse meme, it’s obvious that 2017 was a very tough year. But the sheer number of store closings masked other statistics – including fairly robust in-store spending growth – that tell a different story. There’s no doubt that stores saddled with a lot of bad real-estate and muddied brands got pounded in 2017. I’ve written before that one of the unique economic aspects of online from a marketplace standpoint is the absence of friction. That lack of friction makes it possible for one player (you know who) to dominate in a way that could never have happened in physical retail. At the same time, digital has greatly reduced overall retail friction. And that reduction means that shoppers are not inclined to shop at bad stores just to achieve geographic convenience. So the unsatisfying end of the store market is getting absolutely crushed – and frankly – nothing is going to save it. Digital has created a world that is very unforgiving to bad experience.

On the other hand, if you can exceed that threshold, it seems pretty clear that there is a legitimate and very significant role for physical stores. And then the key question becomes, can you use analytics to make stores an asset.

So let’s talk about…

The Current State of In-Store Customer Analytics

It’s pretty rough out there. A lot of companies have experimented with in-store shopper measurement using a variety of technologies. Mostly, those efforts haven’t been successful and I think there are two reasons for that. First, this type of store analytics is new and most of the stores trying it don’t have dedicated analytics teams who can use the data. IT led projects are great for getting the infrastructure in the store, but without dedicated analytics the business value isn’t going to materialize. I saw that same pattern for years in web analytics before the digital analytics function was standardized and (nearly always) located on the business side. Second, the products most stores are using just suck. I really do feel for any analyst trying to use the deeply flawed, highly aggregated data that gets produced and presented by most of the “solutions” out there. They don’t give analysts enough access to the data to be able to clean it, and they don’t to a very good job cleaning it themselves. And even when the data is acceptable, the depth of reporting and analytics isn’t.

So when I talk to company’s that have invested in existing non Digital Mortar store analytics solutions, what I mostly hear is a litany of complaints and failure. We tried it, but it was too expensive. We didn’t see the value. It didn’t work very well.

I get it. The bottom line is that for analytics to be useful, the data has to be reasonably accurate, the analytics platform has to provide reasonable access to the data and you must have resources who can use it. Oh – and you have to be willing to make changes and actually use the data.

There’s a lot of maturing to do across all of these dimensions. It’s really just this simple. If you are serious about analytics, you have to invest in it. Dollars and organizational capital. Dollars to put the right technology in place and get the people to run it. Organizational capital to push people into actually using data to drive decisions and aggressively test.

Which brings me to….

What to invest in

Our DM1 platform obviously. But that’s just one part of bigger set of analytics decisions. I wrote pretty deeply before the holidays on the various data collection technologies in play. Based on what I saw at NRF, not that much has changed. I did see some improvement in the camera side of the house. Time of Flight cameras are interesting and there are at least a couple of camera systems now that are beginning to do the all-important work of shopper stitching across zones. For small footprint stores there are some viable options in the camera world worth considering. I even saw a couple of face recognition systems that might make point-to-point implementations for analytics practical. Those systems are mostly focused on security though – and integration with analytics is going to be work.

I haven’t written much about mobile measurement, but geo-location within mobile apps is – to quote the Lenox mortgage guy – the biggest no-brainer in the history of earth. It’s not a complete sample. It’s not even a good sample. But it’s ridiculously easy to drop code into your mobile app to geo-locate within the store. And we can take that tracking data and run it into DM1 – giving you detailed, powerful analytics on one of the most important shopper segments you have. It costs very little. There’s no store side infrastructure or physical implementation – and the data is accurate, omni-joinable and super powerful. Small segment nirvana.

The overall data collection technology decision isn’t simple or straightforward for anyone. We’ve actually been working with Capgemini to integrate multiple technologies into their Innovation Center so that we can run workshops to help companies get a hands-on feel for each and – I hope – help folks make the right decision for their stores.

People is the biggest thing. People is the most expensive thing. People is the most important thing. It doesn’t matter how much analytic technology you bring to the table – people are the key to making it work. The vast majority of stores just don’t have store-side teams that understand behavioral data. You can try to create that or you can expand the brief of your digital or omni-channel teams and re-christen them behavioral analytics teams. I like option number two. Why not take advantage of the analytics smarts you actually have? The data, as I’ve said many times before, is eerily similar. We’ve been working hard to beef up partnerships and our own professional services to help too. But while you can use consultants to get a serious analytic effort off the ground, over time you need to own it. And that means deciding where it lives in your organization and how it fits in.

Which I know sounds a lot like…

Everything old is new again

I make no bones about the fact that I dived into store measurement because I thought the lessons of digital analytics mostly applied. In the year sense, I’ve found that to be truer than I knew and maybe even truer than I’d like. Many of the challenges I see in store analytics are the ones we spent more than decade in digital analytics gradually solving. Bad data quality and insufficient attention to making it right. IT organizations focused on collection not use. A focus on site/store measurements instead of shopper measurement.

Some of the problems are common to any analytic effort of any sort. An over-willingness to invest in technology not people (yeah – I know – I’m a technology vendor now I shouldn’t be saying this!). A lack of willingness to change operational patterns to be driven by analytics and measurement and a corresponding challenge actually using analytics. Far too many people willing to talk the talk but unable or unwilling to walk the walk necessary to do analytics and to use it. These are hard problems and it’s only select companies that will ever solve them.

Through it all I see no reason to change the core beliefs that drove me to start Digital Mortar. Shopper analytics is critical to doing retail well. In a time of disruption and innovation, it can drive massive competitive advantage if an organization is willing to embrace it seriously. But that’s not easy. It takes organizational commitment, some guts, good tools and real smarts.

Digital Mortar can provide a genuinely good tool. We can help with the smarts. Guts and commitment? That’s up to you!

The perfect store tracking data collection would be costless, lossless, highly-accurate, would require no effort to deploy, would track every customer journey with high-precision, would differentiate associates and shoppers and provide shopper demographics along with easy opt-out and a minimal creep factor.

We’re not in a perfect world.

In my last post, I summarized in-store data collection systems across the dimensions that I think matter when it comes to choosing a technology: population coverage, positional accuracy, journey tracking, demographics, privacy, associate data collection and separation, ease of implementation and cost. At the top of this post, I summarized how each technology fared by dimension.

As you can see, no technology wins every category, so you have to think about what matters most for your business and measurement needs.

Here’s our thinking about when to use each technology for store tracking:

Camera: Video systems provide accurate tracking for the entire population along with shopper demographics. On the con-side, they are hard to deploy, very expensive, provide sub-standard journey measurement and no opt-out mechanism. From our perspective, camera makes the most sense in very small foot-print stores or integrated into a broader store measurement system where camera is being used exclusively for total counting and demographics.

WiFi: If only WiFi tracking worked better what a wonderful world it would be. It’s nearly costless and there’s almost no effort to deploy. It can differentiate shoppers and Associates and it provides an opt-out mechanism. Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide the accuracy necessary to useful measurement in most retail situations. If you’re an airport or an arena or a resort, you should seriously consider WiFi tracking. But for most stores, the problems are too severe to work around. With store WiFi, you lose tracking on your iPhone shoppers and you get less coverage on all devices. Worse, the location accuracy isn’t good enough to place shoppers in a reasonable store location. It’s easy to fool yourself about this. It’s free. It’s easy. What could go wrong? But keep two things in mind. First, bad data is worse than no data. Making decisions on bad data is a surefire way to screw up. Second, most of the cost of analytics is people not technology. When you give your people bad tools and bad data, they spend most of their time trying to compensate. It just isn’t worth it.

Passive Sniffer (iViu): There’s a lot to like with this system and that’s why they are – by far – our most common go to solution in traditional store settings. iViu devices provide full journey measurement with good enough accuracy. They cover most of the population and what they miss doesn’t feel significantly biased. The devices are inexpensive and easy to install, so full-fleet measurement is possible and PoC’s can be done very inexpensively. They do a great job letting us differentiate and measure Associates and they provide a reasonable opt-out mechanism for shoppers. Even if this technology doesn’t win in most categories, it provides “good-enough” performance in almost every category.

Combining Solutions

This isn’t necessarily an all or nothing proposition. You can integrate these technologies in ways that (sorta) give you the best of both worlds. We often recommend camera-on-entry, for example, even when we’re deploying an iViu solution. Why? Well, camera-on-entry is cheap enough to deploy, it provides demographics, and it provides a pretty accurate total count. We can use that total to understand how much of the population we’re missing with electronic detection and, if the situation warrants it, we can true-up the numbers based on the measured difference.

In addition, we see real value in camera-based display tracking. Without a very fine-grained RFID mesh, electronic systems simply can’t do display interaction tracking. Where that’s critical, camera is the right point solution. In fact, that’s part of what we demoed at the Capgemini Applied Innovation Exchange last week. We used iViu devices for the overall journey measurement and Intel cameras for display interaction measurement.

Similarly, in large public spaces we sometimes recommend a mix of WiFi and iViu or camera. WiFi provides the in-place full journey measurement that would be too expensive to get at any other way. But by deploying camera at choke-points or iViu in places where we need more accurate positional data, we can significantly improve overall collection and measurement without incurring unreasonable costs.

Summing Up

In a very real sense, we have no dog in this hunt. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say we back every dog in this hunt We don’t make hardware. We don’t make more money on one system than another. We just want the easiest, best path to getting the data we need to drive advanced analytics. Both camera systems and WiFi have the potential to be better store tracking solutions with improvements in accuracy and cost. We follow technology developments closely and we’re always hoping for better, cheaper, faster solutions. And there are times right now when using existing WiFi or deploying cameras is the right way to go. But in most retail situations, we think the iViu solution is the right choice.

And the fact that their data flows seamlessly into DM1 in both batch and – with Version 2 – real-time modes? From your perspective, that should be a big plus.

Open data systems are a huge advantage when it comes to planning out your data collection strategy. And finding the right measurement software to drive your analytics is – when you get right down to it – the decision that really matters.

And the good news? That’s the easiest decision you’ll ever have to make. Because there’s really nothing else out there that’s even remotely competitive to DM1.

Data collection technology is at the heart of in-store customer location analytics. In my past two posts, I’ve described some of the cool analytics and measurement that our second release of DM1 brings to the enterprise. And in a way, this is the only stuff that matters. It’s what you use to solve problems. But you can’t solve those problems and DM1 can’t give you the measurement you need, without a workable data collection technology: a technology that’s reliable, accurate, and cost-effective to deploy. In digital analytics, tagging was that technology. And while tagging can seem mysterious, a basic tag is really nothing more than 20 lines of javascript code that any competent programmer could write in a day. For in-store location analytics, it’s a lot more challenging. It’s so challenging, in fact, that we’ve struggled to find data collection technologies that meet our needs. We’ve engineered the DM1 platform to be hardware and collection neutral. We take data from a variety of sources and we’ll engineer the best possible measurement from that source. But we do have a favorite – and it’s a solution that’s become our go to suggestion for MOST clients. It’s called iViu.

The iViu technology uses passive network sniffers. These little devices track smart-phones (and potentially other electronics like Smart Watches). They triangulate on the signal the device sends out to position the phone. And because they can identify the phone, they are able to track the full shopper journey from just outside the store to cash-wrap or exit. Like almost all in-store tracking devices, they can’t identify who somebody is, though they can track the same device over time. So the iViu data does let us track same-store usage (at least outside of the EU where, to be fully compliant with EU guidelines we throw away device signatures at the end of each day) and even the same shopper at different locations under your real estate portfolio. But it doesn’t tell us who the shopper is or give us a natural join key to household or digital data.

In laying out the basics, I’ve glossed over all the complexity involved – and there’s a lot. In store location analytics, data collection technologies compete along several critical dimensions: coverage, accuracy, journey measurement, demographics, privacy, associate tracking, ease of implementation and cost. Each technology and each vendor has its own unique strengths. I’m going to cover each of these factors, explain where iViu fits in, and summarize why we usually end up choosing their technology. The three main location analytics technology contenders are Camera, Passive Network Sniffers (iViu) and off the shelf WiFi access points.

Population Coverage: Ideally, a counting system will measure every shopper who comes in the store. If a counting system doesn’t collect everyone, it’s important to understand the breadth of its coverage and whether it introduces any deep bias into the measurement. In terms of population coverage, you can’t beat camera systems. They are the best technology around for getting 100% coverage. They rarely miss anyone and if anything, their pitfall is that they can be prone to overcounting. All electronic mechanisms are limited to tracking shoppers with smart-phones. In the U.S. (and most of the world), that isn’t much of a problem. It does mean you likely won’t be counting smaller kids. Of more significance, however, is that the phone must be an emitter – with either its Bluetooth or WiFi turned on. Best estimates are that about 15% of people don’t enable those signals. So an iViu device will typically get signals from about 80-85% of the population. And we think that’s a relatively unbiased group – probably a more accurate sample than what we get in the digital world using cookies. One big advantage to the iViu system versus other electronic systems is that iViu does a much better job tracking iPhones or other devices that employ MAC randomization. Why are iPhones an issue? Beginning with iOS8, Apple started randomizing the MAC address of the device when it pings out to the world. WiFi access points and most electronic detectors use the MAC address as the device identifier. So every time an iOS device pings a typical collector, it will look like a different device. In practice, this means that WiFi based coverage will lose all iOS devices that aren’t connected to your network. That’s a pretty huge problem. In addition, iViu devices are dedicated to measurement and they do a much better job of listening than standard WiFi access points. In side by side tests, iViu devices pick up more shoppers, more consistently.

So for Population Coverage, we see it this way:

Camera: Best

iViu: Good

WiFi: Poor

Accuracy: There are lots of different ways to think about accuracy and many different use-cases and data quality problems. I’m going to focus here on basic positional accuracy – the ability to locate the shopper at particular place in the store. Positional accuracy isn’t vital for applications like door-counting – but our DM1 platform absolutely depends on it. We map location to the store and report and segment based on shopper interest. If the mapped location is wrong, our analytics are wrong. With camera systems, each camera covers a specific area of the store and it’s relatively easy to map the location of the person to the specific part of the area the camera covers. For electronic tracking, it’s more complicated. Most electronic systems work by using either (or both) the relative signal strength detected and a triangulation of the signal across devices. But while the methods used are similar, the end result is quite different depending on the implementation and the vendor. Using the iViu devices, we can usually get an accuracy of location down to about 1.5 meters. That’s almost always good enough for the type of measurement we do with DM1. With off-the-shelf WiFi systems, the accuracy is more like 10 meters (and that’s often best case). We can live with that level of accuracy if we’re doing measurement on a mall, stadium, airport or a resort. But for a store, it just isn’t good enough to work with.

So for accuracy we see it this way:

Camera: Good

iViu: Good

WiFi: Poor

Journey Measurement: All the interesting questions in shopper and store optimization involve the journey – the ability to track the shopper visit across the store. It’s fundamental to DM1 and big part of what our analytics bring to the table. In theory, all the data collection technologies should be able to track the journey. In practice, however, we’ve found that electronic systems do this vastly better than the current crop of camera systems. Electronic systems have the fairly easy task of distinguishing one phone from another. Camera systems have to track people. And while there have been dramatic improvements in facial recognition, those improvements are challenged by real-world measurement situations and often haven’t found their way into workable/available technology. A typical camera only covers a 20×20 foot area. So even a modest mall store will require a goodly number of cameras to track its full footprint. As shoppers move from zone-to-zone, the system has to be able to determine that it’s the same person. Camera systems suck at this. Suppose a camera system gets a zone crossing right 90% of the time. That sounds pretty good, until you realize that you have about a 50% chance of following a shopper across 100 feet of your store. It’s because of this limitation that so many camera-based systems are, essentially, zone counters. They count the shoppers in an area and their linger time. They don’t count journeys. It’s not a software problem. It’s a collection problem.

Camera: Poor

iViu: Good

WiFi: Good

Demographics: We’re behavioral analysts, but while we tend to believe that real behavior trumps demographics, it doesn’t mean we think demographics don’t matter. Age and gender are nearly always interesting analytic variables and it’s a distinct advantage to be able to collect them. The scorecard here is simple. Camera does a pretty good job of this. No electronic system does this at all.

Camera: Good

iViu: No

WiFi: No

Privacy: There’s an undeniable creep factor involved with in-store tracking and it can be a legitimate barrier to measurement. All of the technologies involved here do essentially the same thing and all of them do it anonymously. Some of our clients have preferred video to electronic measurement on privacy grounds. I frankly don’t understand that thinking, but privacy is an area where the arguments turn more on perception than reality. Both technologies are providing the same basic measurement and the only significant difference is that electronic measurement provides an opt-out mechanism and video doesn’t. For electronic measurement, there’s a national, online opt-out registry (and, of course, you can always turn off phone WiFi too). There is no equivalent system to opt-out of video measurement and if there was, I imagine it would involve sending in your face – which kind of sucks. I do think video benefits from the fact that most stores have already deployed it for security purposes (though the camera’s you use are usually different), but it’s hard to understand why it’s better to measure people one way than another when the implications for them are identical. I’m going to call this one a wash.

Camera: Ok

iViu: Ok

WiFi: Ok

Associate Tracking: Coming from the digital world, our focus when we started Digital Mortar was all about shoppers. But we quickly realized that tracking associates was critical. First, because associates are a huge part of the customer experience. You can’t really measure shopper journeys unless you can measure when and if they talked to an associate. But there’s also real value in understanding whether you had enough staff on the floor. If they were in the right places. If the type of associate, their training or experience or tactics, made a substantial performance difference. With electronic tracking, it’s pretty easy to measure associates (they just have to carry a device). In most cases, you don’t even have to register that device. DM1 automatically detects devices with employee behaviors and classifies them appropriately. We do that to minimize compliance issues. With camera, it’s a different story. Camera systems either conflate employees with shoppers (which is a disaster) or use supplementary electronic means to remove them from the data. Not only does this introduce complexity into the system, it makes it much harder to track and measure interactions. We’ve also seen minor compliance issues (a few associates forgetting to pick up their tags occasionally) have significant negative implications on measurement quality. It’s worth mentioning here that if you only want to measure associates, there are other technologies worth considering that require code on a mobile device but which will provide VERY accurate and detailed associate tracking.

Camera: Poor

iViu: Good

WiFi: Fair

Ease of Implementation: Let’s face it, having to put hardware into stores is a hassle. One of the big benefits to WiFi based measurement is that it can take advantage of existing access points that were put there to provision WiFi to customers or to support store functions. Every other form of measurement takes new hardware and store installation. But there is a pretty big difference in the level of effort required. It takes a lot of cameras to cover a store. The cameras have to be in the ceiling and they have to precisely placed. It’s real work to get right and it’s often expensive, involves some degree of retrofitting and is time consuming. An iViu device will cover something like 10x the area of a camera – so you need a lot less of them. It’s easier to install. It doesn’t have to precisely placed and it doesn’t have to ceiling mounted. We’ve put iViu devices under tables, on top of or behind displays, on pillars and even in drawers. They do require power (plug or PoE), but they’re a snap to setup – it’s pretty much plug and play – and we’ve found that we can install in most locations without huge difficulty.

Camera: Poor

iViu: Fair

WiFi: Good

Cost: You know how athletes who sign huge new contracts always say “It wasn’t about the money” and you’re thinking – “Of course it was about the money”? Money matters. Realistically, a store can only afford to spend so much on measurement. Worse, the more you sink into the hardware, the less you can spend on the stuff that actually makes a difference – the analytics software and the people to drive it. At Digital Mortar, we’re believers in comprehensive measurement. We want to measure every store – not one store out of a hundred. And if you’re trying to measure Associates, optimize locally, or do real-time interactions, measuring a single store just doesn’t cut it. So having a measurement technology that’s cheap enough to go fleet-wide? We think that’s priceless. From that perspective, you can’t beat WiFi since it’s usually already in place and even if you have to provision it, the cost is reasonable and there are extra benefits. But, as noted, there’s pretty limited analytics you can do with a 10 meter margin of error. For a system that provides robust measurement, we like the fact that iViu devices are very cost-effective. The hardware for most stores costs less than $5k (that’s to buy the devices not an annual cost). Even very, very large stores will cost less than $20K per store. Camera systems are often far more costly – to the point that they are generally impractical for very large stores and make deploying to a large number of stores impossible.

Camera: Poor

iViu: Good

WiFi: Very Good

As you can see, there isn’t one solution that’s perfect in every respect. And in the real world, we often find reasons to deploy each technology. In Part 2 of this post, I’ll summarize the findings, explain why – given it’s overall profile – iViu makes sense for most retail stores, and also talk a little bit about the ways that you can blend technologies to get the best of each world.

People have struggled with this (big) data provider model but Factual feels like it’s found a real (and valuable) niche. Would love to see more of this grow since external data is a huge miss in most big data systems.

Targeted VoC is a powerful (and totally neglected) tool for personalization. Facebook’s experience is entirely relevant to ANY content producer. I don’t know if I can take credit for this, but I suggested this to folks at Facebook a couple of years back!

An interesting discussion of the problems in identifying “likely” voters and the benefits of behavioral data integration. Food for thought in the enterprise world as well where the equivalent is often possible but rarely done.